HackMDHow to Ensure Runtime Protection for Application Security
Software applications are at the core of the whole digital world. Hence, application security plays an essential part in the software development process, as hackers always come up with new and different ways of getting access to the system, therefore, application security is always the highest priority in most organizations.
Application security is the process of using best practices and techniques to secure the software and hardware of the computer systems from any outside malicious attacks. In simple terms application security can be described as using different security measures at the application level for preventing unauthorized access and the leak of valuable information or data from the software application.
Even after employing various security techniques some of the vulnerabilities go unnoticed during the quality assurance phase and they end up in production, which hackers can use to their advantage to get unauthorized access into the system and cause a security breach.
Once a vulnerability or bug goes into production, even the network defenders find it difficult to defend the applications from various attacks. This can be protected by ensuring that the applications themselves identify the attacks and protect themselves in real-time. Such protection can be ensured using runtime protection. So, this article explains what is runtime protection and how it can be used to secure the application in production.
Runtime Protection
The application layer of any software application is the most attacked layer and is considered to be the difficult layer to defend in the entire software stack, hence it requires various appsec testing tools to ensure that the application runs securely while it is deployed to production. These tools are mainly divided into two main categories of security scanning and runtime protection tools. Security scanning tools are used when the applications are in the development stage to detect and remediate the security vulnerabilities and risks while runtime protection tools are used while the application is in production and it works as an extra layer of security to the application.
Runtime Protection or Runtime application self-protection (RASP) is enabled while the application is deployed to production. It is a security method that is linked to the application runtime environment and can control the execution of the application to detect and prevent real-time cyber attacks. Runtime protection automatically prevents attacks without any human intervention by reconfiguring itself as a response to malicious attacks or threats. It analyzes the suspicious behavior by continuously monitoring the entire process and detecting and mitigating the security threats.
RASP runs on a server and is triggered when an application runs in production, it is designed in such a way that it can detect attacks in real time. RASP analyzes both the behaviour of the app as well as of the possible attack that is going to happen on the application and takes decisions based on the type of attack and defends the application in real-time.
Working of Runtime Application Protection
Runtime application self-protection (RASP) starts working when the application is deployed to production but whenever a security threat occurs in an app, RASP addresses the problem by taking control of the app. RASP raises an alarm when it finds something malicious in its diagnostic mode, while in its protection mode it finds a solution and tries to stop the malicious activity.
RASP has an insight into the logic, configuration and data flow of the application and hence it can prevent attacks with precision. It can also recognize the difference between the actual attacks and authorized requests for accessing the data, reducing the probability of false positives that gives more time to the network defenders to deal with the real problems.
RASP can be implemented in many ways, developers can add function calls into the source code of the application that can allow access to the RASP tool, with this method developers have the ability to decide what should be protected within the application like signups, logins, database queries or other important functions. Another approach is to wrap the whole application into another container, which in turn would secure the application with a single button click.
RASP Approaches
The developers can adopt one of the following approaches to integrate the RASP into the application.
Using Plugins
Various servlet filters, SDKs and a variety of plugins can be implemented into the web server or Apache Tomcat for monitoring and inspecting the HTTP requests coming into the application. The requests with vulnerabilities can be blocked and RASP can take preventive measures.
Creating Binary Instrumentation
Binary Instrumentation is the process of adding new code to the application without affecting the logic of the application. It includes adding monitoring and controlling functions into the app for identifying security threats, and recording and blocking them.
Replacing JVM
The standard libraries (JAR/JVM for Java) can be replaced with the RASP layer so that it can be able to listen to the incoming calls to the libraries and apply the rules as the calls are being intercepted. Thus RASP has the overall view of the code of the application and the framework that enables the RASP to learn about the behaviour and sequence flow of the application through monitoring the calls to the application.
Implementing Virtualization
Virtualization is the process of creating a virtual copy of the application, this process can also be called containerized runtime protection. It creates a copy of the application and follows the application behaviour during the runtime on the copy that has been created and learns through the app's logic, parameters and outputs that have been generated which is then used to detect the faux requests from the incoming requests and take remedial action according to based on the requirement.
RASP can also be enabled for cloud applications as the code would always be protected every time no matter where the app goes, its configuration can also be added to the build scripts without updating the firewall or network configurations.
Conclusion
Application security is an important aspect for any software organization using runtime protection in the application security stack can be a game changer as it can protect the application from security risks and threats. Various RASP tools can be employed to protect the application, hence RASP can be used to effectively deal with security threats as it can be easily integrated with the existing application without impacting the app's performance.
